It's a measure of contemporary songwriting's narrow scope that Two Gallants have found themselves immersed in a minor controversy.

For penning Long Summer Day, a first-person narrative of a pre-Civil Rights southern black man that borrows from '30s singer Moses "Clear Water" Platt and sprinkles in the "N-word," the San Francisco duo has come under fire for appropriating an experience they have no claim to. Proclaiming it "deeply insensitive and offensive," Pitchfork Media started the brouhaha by suggesting there's little value in "an account of racism from people who've never stared down its barrel."

While also drawing well-deserved raves for What the Toll Tells, a sophomore album that fuses Western folk, southern blues and straight-ahead punk into dark, epic tales of outlaws and outsiders, Two Gallants have faced similar criticism for other songs. For refusing to stick to their own era, the twentysomethings have been labelled imposters, guilty of peddling what Under the Radar magazine deemed "bullshit nostalgia."

For singer Adam Stephens, though, there's nothing phony about reviving the art of American storytelling through song.

"I don't think it happens very much, so people aren't really able to get it," Stephens says over the phone from their tour van. "[The same critics are] going to read some modern writer who wrote about things that took place over a hundred years ago. I don't really see why, just because we're playing contemporary music, we can't write about things that took place in the past.

"I think people who are trying to write the rules of songwriting are dumbing down the crowd and not being very demanding on songwriters in general, if they're gonna say it's inappropriate to write from different perspectives."

As for the Long Summer Day flap, Stephens doesn't pull punches. "I don't really see how some other white dude who's sitting behind a desk can go and tell me what my vocabulary can be for songwriting," he says. "The song itself means a lot to both of us - giving respect to a lot of older black musicians from the '20s or '30s who affected our music profoundly, and who at the time were going through these things and had no way of expressing it in song 'cause it was completely taboo and they probably would've gotten killed."

No surprise there. Like most good storytellers, Two Gallants relish an audience.